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Chances are you have no idea how much your health care will cost when you retire. I don’t. Trying to conjure up a reliable estimate gives me brain freeze.

But if you’re not including a ballpark figure in your retirement savings calculations, you could be setting yourself up for a sickening financial surprise. That’s especially true for women, because we live three years longer than men on average, which puts added pressure on us to make our money last.

“It is extremely important that health care costs are factored into retirement savings strategies today so that retirees can be prepared to pay their medical bills throughout retirement,” Brad Kimler, executive vice president of Fidelity’s Benefits Consulting business, noted in May, when his company issued its annual retiree health cost projections.

Women Need to Face Reality

Women, it turns out, underestimate their future health care costs far more than men, according to a recent study by Professor Allison Hoffman of the UCLA School of Law and Professor Howell Jackson of Harvard Law School.

When the researchers asked 1,700 near-retirees and retirees how much they expect their out-of-pocket health expenses to total in the future, the projections from female participants were 50% lower than the estimates of their male counterparts. But medical experts estimate that the typical woman will actually spend 50% more for health care in retirement than the typical man.

Lowballing Long-Term Care Costs

Last week, Nationwide Financial found that boomers greatly underestimate the cost of long-term care, too — a potentially huge health care outlay for retirees and an expense women are more likely to incur than men.

Americans 50 and older underestimate the annual costs of long-term care by more than three times the actual expense, according to the Nationwide survey. They expect long-term care costs to run $78,923 annually. But by 2030, the year the last boomers will retire, the cost of a nursing home will reach $265,000 a year, according to Nationwide.

And the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates 70 percent of Americans over 65 will need long-term care during their lifetime.